In Brief

Campbell appointed to NSERC

Dr. Eddy Campbell, Memorial’s vice-president (academic), has been appointed to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Dr. Campbell has been vice-president at Memorial since 2004. He is also a professor with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Previously, Dr. Campbell was at Queen’s University, where he served as professor and head of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and
associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science.

NSERC is a federal agency whose role is to make investments in people, discovery and innovation for the benefit of all Canadians. The agency supports some 22,000 university students and postdoctoral fellows in their advanced studies. NSERC promotes discovery by funding more than 10,000 university professors every year, and fosters innovation by encouraging more than 800 Canadian companies to participate and invest in university research projects.

New look for my.mun.ca

A new look for the my.mun.ca portal was rolled out on Feb. 5. The new portal includes an updated look, reorganized content and a simpler way to manage that content.

Sarah Arnott leads the portal project for ccwebworks, the web development unit at Computing and Communications. She said that my.mun.ca offers a single entry point for a number of applications that students and staff use on a regular basis. This includes webmail, self-service and Distance Education resources, access to payroll information for staff, and university news and announcements, just to name a few.

Ms. Arnott said the beauty of the portal is that users can add features they want, and remove the ones they don’t.

“The idea is you log on once and you get access to several other web applications,” she said. “So a student could log on and get access to their e-mail, Memorial Self-Service, WebCT.

“You will also be able to remove a lot of your layout. It is a lot more flexible.”

While the portal has been around since 2003, Ms. Arnott said not everyone feels comfortable with using it on a regular basis. The new design is in part intended to make the portal easier to use.

Faculty and staff are also generally slow to adopt portal technology. “So this upgrade is an attempt to make it easier to access the service,” she said.

The portal team is encouraging feedback  positive or negative  through portal@mun.ca.

Books with Wings

Books from Memorial University will soon be travelling to Afghanistan as part of the Books with Wings collaborative project between Canadian medical students and their counterparts in Afghanistan. At Memorial, second-year medical student Dawn Armstrong is the project liaison, and she is already pleased with the donations starting to fill the drop off box in the Health Sciences Library.

“We are looking for books that are less than 10 years old and in very good condition,” she said. “Besides medical books we are looking for books in any health sciences area of study as well as basic medical sciences texts.”

Donating books is only one way to help this project. “We need tax deductible donations to help ship the books, which will first go to the central Canadian drop off at the University of Manitoba and then on to Afghanistan. We also need donations to help build bookshelves in Afghanistan, which cost $60 Canadian each.”

Books with Wings began as the Kabul Medical Library Project, initiated by Dr. Richard Gordon and medical students at the University of Manitoba. Past efforts have resulted in the collection and shipment of over 1,700 medical textbooks with an estimated value of over $250,000.